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Lenten Lamentations
I don’t usually participate in Lent, the season marking the weeks before Jesus’ last days. It’s kinda “churchy” and I don’t do churchy. But this site and this blog and this entry hit me in all the feels right now, and I cannot express to you how apt this is: “We lament because paradoxically, the cure for the pain is in our engagement of it.” I am lamenting some poor choices I’ve made very recently. I’ll confess I’ve had two sleepless nights so far as I consider over and over what I did, and how I broke my own principles and my own values. I lament that with all my…
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Getting From A to B
It was a hard day today. I spent much of it reflecting upon the journey and upon my words and my deeds. I wrote earlier about words and deeds, and as karma and God would have it, the lesson bounced back to me to learn. It is hard, damned hard, to make yourself fit into your own moral principles. You discover that what you think are your principles are really your presumptions, that you think are “good” and all you need to do is to be bold and act rightly. That’s when you find out that the real you is quite alive, and is ready to sabotage and reveal itself.…
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Words and Deeds
This is short today, and a freebie: it matters that we use words. It matters that we listen to what people are saying. It matters that we think deeply about what we experience and what we hear, and even that we think about what we write or say. Words tell us things that can generally be understood in the same way by most people. (Yeah, there’s a philosophical argument that no one experiences the same experience, whether it’s from words or from interactions, but in my view there’s a general idea that we can understand even though we appreciate it with different emphases.) Words help me process my feelings or…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 12: Icebergs
“One of the breakthroughs I had … was understanding the degree to which I tend to align what I see and hear with my underlying beliefs.” You know, this is a great opener to help us understand how it all happened with us, the good people. I presume that most white people think they’re good people, and therefore just assume that they can’t be either racist or contributing to racism. “I don’t generally feel negative emotions about people of color, and generally don’t think negative thoughts about them.” How could anyone be contributing to racism or even be a racist themselves if they don’t have overt emotions and thoughts? We…
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Guest link – #SeminaryWhileBlack
This is a link to a blog I follow—The Won Percent—and I want to note, upfront, that I am not promoting the hashtag #SeminaryWhileBlack. That would be presumptuous of me, not to mention appropriative. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the post, especially as I read accounts from students at seminaries who discover that their texts are usually from the same source—European men. It’s critical that we have a broader view of theology than just what was created in cold North climes. There is a tremendous need for something more that what’s been traditionally offered. And the quote from Carter Woodson, from the 1920s, is just killer: In schools of theology Negroes…
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Green Books, Black Lives, and White History
I’m reading some interesting responses to “The Green Book,” which, if you have been in a cave in Thailand for the past six months, is a movie about a white racially antagonistic chauffeur who ferries around a black musician. There have been complains, and their have been counter-complaints, largely on the line of “it’s just a movie.” (I have written elsewhere about how our entertainment does matter. A movie is never just a movie.) The complaints about the movie itself might be due to what’s in this article, about a slice of history that is used as a prop for another story entirely. I researched the meaning of the Green…
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When Home Is Gone
I’m seeing something recently that is new to my vision, and that is the homeless. Yes, of course I mean the homeless we see on the streets and hills. Seattle, like many other cities, has a growing, visible issue with our homeless population. Unlike other issues that we can corral behind fences and locked doors, the issue of the homeless confronts us because there is no law that is broken if you have no home. You might break a law if you attempt to build a camp site or take over a doorway to sleep, but Seattle in its majesty permits the rich and the poor to be homeless—as long…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 11: Headwinds and Tailwinds
“Skin color itself is not the barrier; it’s the beliefs attached to it. And beliefs, compared to birth dates or other more tangible barriers, are harder to pinpoint and also much harder to change.” The chapters are starting to get down into the weeds now, and it’s getting thornier to navigate. This chapter explores the systems that create systemic racism. Helpfully, it does not just say that systemic racism is a thing, but it explores the interlocking small systems that make up the bigger system. The systemic part of the systems—they all work together in their small cycles to become one big Krebs cycle of racism. This reveals something in…
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To Wrestle with the Angel
Today I participated in a hands-on seminar led by James Whitfield, CEO of the Leadership Eastside organization. We went through a series of exercises and discussions about the topic of racism—what it is at a personal level, what it is at the systemic level, and what it is as expressed in our social structures. It was a preliminary discussion—in three hours with 27 people it can be difficult to get much deeper than introductions and first steps. But it did make me realize a bit more of how deeply the systems of racism are entwined in the American definitions of “American” and “white” and even “Christian.” As a class (as…
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Entertainment Matters
We usher at the local theatre about once a month for live productions. It’s our “date night,” and we generally make a half-day of it. We have to prepare for the show, because even though we are “out there” in the lobby or in the aisles, we are still part of the theatre production: our clothes and our demeanor are to support the on-stage events. Our customers are the theatre-goer who’s paying for a seat and a view and an experience. We are there to assist in that. So we dress to be somewhat invisible and yet in ways that mark us as not quite blended in with the paying…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, education, family, history, Life Recovery Skills, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 10: The Melting Pot
“The United States has reaffirmed its commitment to being a melting-pot society adhering to Anglo-Saxon standards, as opposed to a mosaic nation built on the diversity of multiple cultures.” This chapter dives into a common myth about America—that it is a “melting pot.” It is, if by that you mean that everyone is baptized with fire to lose their heritage and identity, to be reborn as a WASP-y character—as long as they have visibly white skin and features. The stories here match some of the experiences of my mother’s side of the family—she was an immigrant from World War II, and when she went through Ellis Island (figuratively; I’m not…
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To Study Portuguese
When I was younger (well, any day in the past is when I was younger, but stay with me here), I worked in an environment where many of my co-workers did not have English as their first language. The most common language they spoke was Portuguese. Because I’m curious about things I don’t know, and because I really wanted to be able to talk with them and understand them better, I decided to add classes in Portuguese to my college courses. I took a year of Portuguese hoping to get familiar enough to be able to listen to them, and perhaps even to have a real conversation. I remember at…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 9: White Superiority
[Edited 2/23/2019 A point of clarification on this post: the indented portions are quotes from the book by Debby Irving, “Waking Up White.” Along with several other people, some who are posting in public, I’m going through the book chapter-by-chapter, attempting to think out loud what I my responses are and what my desires are. While I am attempting to be truthful, I am also attempting to be sensitive to my friends and family in the wider community, including my friends and family who are of non-European descent. If something I write seems injurious to you, please do let me know—while my intent is one thing, I realize that impact…
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Prayer to Persephone
Today’s post is just poetry, this time from the sublime Edna St. Vincent Millay: Prayer to Persephone by Edna St. Vincent Millay Be to her, Persephone, All the things I might not be; Take her head upon your knee. She that was so proud and wild, Flippant, arrogant and free, She that had no need of me, Is a little lonely child Lost in Hell,—Persephone, Take her head upon your knee; Say to her, “My dear, my dear, It is not so dreadful here.”
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I’m Just Here to Dance
I had an interesting question the other day: are Christians good? The subject came up because there is a defense offered by some Christians (and some people outside the faith, I imagine) that we Christians are “good” by dint of the Savior redeeming us from sin. We are given a new, God-inspired and -directed nature. Our sins and our past are washed way into the sea of forgiveness. We have God’s very Spirit in us to remind us and prompt us and even empower us. We can move through love into the Kingdom… All the theology comes to mind, and I could write like this for a long time without…
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Trying Every Doorknob
What do I do about the things that I see that I think aren’t right? What do I do about the situations where injustice occurs, where oppression is maintained, where there is no room for the human and the person and the needs to be understood, much less addressed? So much is a giant system that is rolling on unchecked, and all I have are these small tools and weak commitments that are easily broken by adamant obstacles...
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 8: Racial Categories
“The biggest problem with America’s idea of racial categories is that they’re not just categories: they’ve been used to imply a hierarchy born of nature. Regardless of how racial categories came into being, Americans have been cast in racial roles that have the power to become self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating prophecies.” There’s some great things in this chapter which pulls apart racial categories using a great analogy of dividing people arbitrarily into groups based upon hair color. Each hair color is associated with a type of achievement based upon who-knows-what, but there is some assignment done that people accept. (Work with me here. It’s analogy.) Now, over time, the original philosophy of…
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In the Fields of the Lord
I guess I’m on a kick of listening to acoustic, and finding intriguing (for me) albums that have that just-right touch of delicacy and strength. The album Work Songs by The Porter’s Gate is giving me much rest right now even as I consider the work to be done. I’m energized by the idea that the gospel means something, and that meaning is more than a theological nicety. Now don’t get me wrong. Theology is a noble art and field of study. I absolutely do not mock it or think it powerless. Honest. At one point I thought my love for the study of God and the things of God…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 7: The GI Bill
“I couldn’t shake the duped feeling—duped and infuriated to have inherited a legacy that contaminated me with injustice.” This chapter just slays. It nails the center of gravity in American white racism—Economics. Money. Power. Fear. Greed. Exclusion. Hatred. Willful ignorance and blind indifference. These are all here, but it boils down to economics. The earliest Africans brought here in August of 1619 were brought here as economically advantageous assets to white landowners, white entrepreneurs, white households. Chattel slavery was economics—how could you grow tobacco and cotton for the world market at competitive products at a profit if you had to pay your workers? Jim Crow was a de facto extension…
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Little Things with Great Love
I’m snowed in today (and have been since Thursday), and though we may get some relief this afternoon what with the sunny weather, it’s still quite cold and icy. Although it’s Sunday, the traditional day for church, most churches in our area are closed. We don’t expect snow like this and to last as long as this, so in many communities snowplows are either not available or they plow only the mains streets—and not us three miles from the center of town in a rural neighborhood. So we wait for the rains to come again, as they always do, and we occupy ourselves with activities that can be done usefully…
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Review: When They Call You a Terrorist
Yet another reminder of James Baldwin’s words* “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, is a deep book, y’all, and it is not a philosophical treatise of the meaning and purpose of “Black Lives Matter” as something that is plopped down into life, shoving aside other things, just one of many interests in the black community. This is the story of one person growing up–and growing up–to see the world around her with an acute eye as to its hostility to her and her…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Civil War, American Exceptionalism, faith, history, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 6: From Confusion to Shock
“Racism wasn’t about this person or that, this upset or that, this community or that; racism is, and always has been, the way America has sorted and ranked its people in a bitterly divisive, humanity-robbing system.” I suppose everyone needs a hero, and I suspect everyone wants to be a hero. This chapter explores the idea that we can want to resolve terrible issues in our culture and in our world, and we can even attempt to do so—all while being completely unware of what we’re doing and why. There’s an impulse to do good when we think we see a problem and we think we see the solution. “I…
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It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
You know, as we get older our sleep cycles shift. Used to be that I could sleep straight through, night after night, for six hours. In bed by 11pm, up at 5am, without an alarm clock. Fairly predictable. Things have changed—without my desire!—so that my sleeping patterns are irregular. I am desperate to get to bed before 9pm, I sleep until 1 am, and then I’m wide awake until 5am, where I sleep another hour then I’m up for the day. I don’t spend my time in bed tossing and turning. That does no good. I’m up. I’m thinking. I’m woke. I read, and sometimes I write. But recently I…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 5: Within the Walls
“For me, part of the waking-up-white process is acknowledging that I’m a recovering lemming*…I never considered that the space I was taking, or the resources I was using, might be being withheld from another to make it all possible.” I found this chapter to be provoking and troubling, and I lead off with this twinned set of quotes. So much of my experience is similar author, not in fulfillment but in similar design. The creation of whiteness, and its enveloping me with its cocoon, led me to believe that this is just how things were as a child and even as an adult, that it was reasonable to expect others…
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Are #BlackLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter Opposite Sides? A Conversation
An interesting conversation in church this morning, Our pastor, after reading a few books about race and conciliation (Including Jemar Tisby’s “The Color of Compromise”) talked about this issue of conciliation, and as part of the message brought up two parishioners. One, an African American member of the congregation, and one a police officer, also a member of the congregation. He had them sit next to him and answer questions, and I found a few things useful: The men were able to explain the meaning of the hashtags – BkLM is about saying “black lives matter, too” and BuLM is about acknowledging the risky nature of policing. The hashtags do…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, faith, family, history, justice, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 4: Optimism
“By pretending the world was virtually problem-free, my family culture left me grossly underprepared to solve problems.” The 50s and 60s were a time in America unlike any before or after. We had won a war (with the uncredited assistance of Russia who lost 10 million men and 14 million civilians to our 410 thousand men and some civilians), there were no real economic challenges (Soviet Russia was a political challenge, but who knows how much of it was hyped up to win votes?), we were prosperous and confident and expanding. Scouts and YMCA and camping and museums were all out there for our entertainment and enrichment, and we simply…
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Believe
Something I think about every so often is how we are sometimes two people. We are people who think we are driven by facts and logic. And we are the people who are driven by our fears and our hopes. I think about this today, during Black History Month. We are driven to think that we celebrate all people, that our country is a land of opportunity, that anyone can succeed. Black History Month celebrates the success of black Americans. Anyone can succeed if they just try. And we shy away from an uncomfortable truth that such a belief is not based upon facts. It’s based upon naïveté. Some people…
